"What does that mean?"
"I dunno. Young deputy. A comer. Could go this way or that way or some other way. And--as everyone but you has noticed--idolizes you. For all the wrong reasons, I might add."
"Guerrera?"
"You think?" Bear shot Tim a you'd-better-think-about-it glare and feigned a sudden absorption in the cookie-cutter triplexes flying by on his left.
A few minutes later, they eased up to the house. Bear let the car idle, ignoring the solicitous autogal--"Next location, please."
Bear stared at the house, his face shifting. "Fuck. I hate this. I fucking hate this." He bounced his forehead off the top of the steering wheel a few times. "Okay, let's go."
At the door Bear's and Tim's painful Spanglish only made the encounter more demeaning to everyone and prolonged the agony of the revelation. Immediately the woman took in their dread by osmosis, but they had to run through "We're siento, Marisol is muerto" three or four times until the denial-fueled hopefulness dwindled from her eyes and her composure crumbled. One of her arms flared to help her keep her balance and Tim caught it and walked her to the couch, but she refused to sit. The footrest, now re-covered in plastic, bore a few stains from their last visit.
Tim focused hard on her hysterical Spanish and figured out she was asking variations on what he and Bear had termed the Impossible Rhetorical--"?Como pudo pasar?" How could this happen? He was having a difficult time keeping his emotions in check; they came at him from hidden angles, each trailing a memory: Bear's mud-caked boots the night he came to tell him and Dray that Ginny had been killed. The sheriff's dispatcher's static-laced voice announcing that a pregnant deputy had been shot point-blank. Tim's exhaustion caught up to him in a rush, and the room seemed to close in on him--the oppressive kitchen humidity, the sticky-sweet smell of the Advent candles, the woman's anguished sobbing.
Everyone murdered is a son or a daughter. Cops and deputies start burning out once they acknowledge this simple fact. The awareness--the true awareness--leads to a kind of insanity, a blurred vision. So they fight it tooth and nail. They fight it with the bottle. They fight it by pushing away what is theirs with what is not. The smart ones fight it with a cynical eye and gallows humor. And some of them--sometimes the toughest of them--just decide to give up one day and eat their guns or ride motorcycles into brick walls. To acknowledge the essential humanity of each bludgeoned face, each sprawled corpse, each Dumpster baby, is to run the gauntlet with every nerve exposed. But not to acknowledge it is a kind of denial, a kind of death in itself.
The shotgun blast that had entered Dray had also knocked Tim's careful system of balance and countermeasure out of whack. His compartments bled into one another; his boundaries slid; his lines blurred. In the haze he sensed a barely conscious choice at hand: He could take either nothing personally or everything. He could either connect the dots between his comatose wife and the other victims or deny them all a place in his heart.
Somewhere the woman's halting English returned. "She will be home. She have to come home to me."
And Bear's soothing murmur: "I'm so sorry, ma'am. We're so sorry."
She looked impossibly frail in Bear's embrace. Tim cleared his throat and blinked away the wetness in his eyes.
"I just make her bed again. Her bed is ready for her." The woman tore at her shirt, her knuckles knobby from years of hard work. She collapsed on the couch, face pressed to the cushion.
Bear did a double take at Tim. "You all right?" he mouthed.
Tim wiped his nose, nodded.
"Why don't you go to the car?"
"I'm fine."
"You'll be finer in the car."
The woman's hoarse sobbing was audible all the way down the walk.
Bear climbed into the car twenty minutes later. Tim's eyes and nose were rimmed red, the contrast severe against the pallid skin of his face. His breathing had settled, the calm after the storm. Bear looked more than a touch unsettled. Tim wouldn't turn to meet his gaze, so Bear faced forward, hands on the wheel, elbows dangling. His head was ducked; he was at a loss.
They were pointed east, and morning leaked at the horizon, a slow, orange bleed.
Tim's voice was cracked and quiet. "Take me to Dray."
Chapter 30
The waiting-room TV, suspended from a bracket in the corner, offered a virtual face blast of information. Shots within shots, subheadlines with bullet points, an Energizer Bunny crawl across the bottom: Laughing Sinner killed in Fillmore shoot-out....Pregnant deputy shot by fugitive Den Laurey still in critical condition.... Another Cholo found dead. Authorities believe killing related to biker gang war.... AP: Mutilated female corpse discovered in former IronClad Parts warehouse....
Tim caught a few stares from the waiting wounded, who--as a corralled TV viewership on a bureaucratic timetable--had no doubt watched grainy, zoom-lensed Deputy Rackley poking through one of the three high-profile crime scenes that had emerged last night and this morning.
Dray was alone in her room, arrayed peacefully under the covers, her head tilted just so on the pillow. He spoke her name, half expecting her to rise and greet him. Her skin felt hard and waxy and gave off the scent of antiseptic. He missed the smell of her, and it struck him that there was no way to recapture it unless Dray reentered her life, unless she showered, sweated, ate her vast yet specific array of foods, rubbed jasmine lotion into her hands in her elaborate manner that made her look like a cartoon villain scheming. Her smell captured the combination of countless variables that were her life, that were her alive.
A middle-aged woman--a physical therapist by her ID card--entered and introduced herself. She was heavyset and to the point. "The nurses in the CWA told me you're the guy. In charge of catching those bikers? I have a daughter who lives out in Simi...." Her thought trailed off into a dark corner. "You catch those guys."
She pulled the sheets off Dray and rearranged her body with practiced, no-nonsense movements. Dray's arms looked thin, dwarfed by her belly.
"How's she doing?" Tim asked.
"Still not arousable to stimuli. No purposeful movements. The doc says the baby's going strong, so that's good."
She grasped Dray's calf and foot and rocked the leg, as if shaking off dust, then bent it back. She repeated the motion a few times before switching legs. He watched her work. Seeing Dray animated, even falsely, gave him a stab of irrational hopefulness.
Tim cleared his throat. "What can I expect here?"
"There are significant variations based on the nature of the injury--"
"No bullshit," he said softly. "Please."
She paused and regarded him, Dray's foot in hand, before returning to her task. For a moment Tim thought she wasn't going to answer. Then, without looking up, she said, "I can't speak to brain damage. My area of expertise is muscle atrophy. She has a week or two before there's appreciable deterioration. Rehabilitation gets harder after that. And, you know, the likelihood that..."
"That she won't be able to."
The physical therapist contemplated Dray's leg bends with renewed focus. Tim watched the knee rise, fall, rise.
Think this is the best use of your time?
"Shut up, Dray."
The therapist caught his murmur, raised an eyebrow in his direction.
I miss you, too, babe, but you have more important things to do than watch me play cadaver Twister.
Tim watched the physical therapist rotate Dray's foot in precise circles.
So you won't leave?
Not right now.
Make yourself useful, then.
The therapist placed Dray's heel on her own shoulder and elevated the leg to stretch the hamstring, her fingers laced to brace the knee straight. She finished and jotted a few notes on her clipboard.
"Can I?"
She looked up at Tim, surprised. Her eyes twinkled with a sad grin that never made it to the rest of her face. "Of course, hon."
Tim set his holstered gun on the neighboring chair and rose. The therapist pau
sed at the door, monitoring him before withdrawing.
Tim started at the beginning of the routine. Dray's bare sole fit perfectly, as always, in the curve of his hand. He'd stretched her enough, before their early-morning runs, to note that her muscles were now tight and cranky. He rotated her arms, compressed her shoulders, kneaded her neck.
He kissed her cool lips before slipping on his holster and heading back to work.
Chapter 31
Wristwatch Annie shoulder-slumped against the chain-link outside the Sinners' clubhouse, twisting a high heel into the curb and negotiating with a guy in a gray Pinto who was leaning across his passenger seat, john style. Despite the weather she wore a miniskirt, her leather jacket huffing around her shoulders.
When Tim slammed the door of the Explorer and headed across the street, the guy sped off. Despite having grabbed no more than a few hours' sleep, Tim felt surprisingly lucid.
Annie dropped a Baggie to the curb and slid it back with her heel until it slipped through the sewer grates. She smiled sweetly at Tim, showing off matching shelves of creative dentition.
Tim nodded at the grate through which the drugs had made their getaway. "Crank or heroin?"
Her eyes had the infinity stare, pupils dilated wider than the morning sun allowed. "Just sugar, sugar."
"You'd better be careful. I'll write you up for littering."
She returned his smile. "You're a naughty boy. Go to my room."
"How'd you get the name Wristwatch Annie?"
"You really wanna know?"
He'd fallen into his and Dray's bed last night grateful for his exhaustion; he'd been unable to muster the energy to be mournful. The light had never made it on, so he'd barely distinguished the house as his home--he'd entered a dark box, slept, and left while the air was still slate at the windows. Knowing he was on the Sinners' hit list, he'd gone as he'd come, over the back fence, a fugitive on his own property.
A Christmas morning very different from the one he would have chosen to wake up to. Annie's game attitude lightened it up, for a moment.
It required three separate parties to escort Tim through the yard and clubhouse upstairs to Uncle Pete's room. Hound Dog, looking displeased beneath his fluffy topknot, balanced atop a card table. Sitting on what looked like a reinforced piano bench, Uncle Pete revved up an electric razor and sculpted the poodle's tail pom-pom. Curls of white hair clung to Uncle Pete's forearms and lay like shorn wool at his feet. The dog's lip wrinkled into a soundless growl at Tim's appearance.
Ash-laden cigarette dangling aesthetically from the corner of his mouth, Uncle Pete flicked the razor at the dog's underbelly. His arm jiggled; stretch marks interrupted his biceps tattoo like vertical blinds. He wore a black shirt with white block letters across the chest: DEEP THINKER. Aphoristic T-shirts seemed a bikerwear staple.
"This here"--Pete leaned back, admiring his work--"this here's the English-saddle clip. Standard poodles are like Harleys--well-designed machines. Waterfowl retrievers. Truffle hunters. Vaudeville performers. They're the smartest dogs, you know that? Clean, too. They don't shed. You leave that to us, don't you, Hound Dog?"
In response the poodle made a sound like a whinny.
Uncle Pete's eyes finally pulled north, taking in Tim. "Where's your backup? The spic and the muscle? Ain't you worried we gonna carve you up?"
"Not a bit."
Pete pinched his cigarette like a joint, sucking a final inhale. The ash fell across his chest, and he brushed it to the carpet with a few delicate flicks of his hand.
"Diamond Dog showed up dead," Tim said. "Wouldn't you know it, he was running with Goat."
A flicker of alarm showed in Uncle Pete's face before receding beneath his usual calm. It was only an instant, but it was precisely what Tim was looking for.
"No matter how I try to keep those boys away from trouble..." Pete shook his head. "Ain't it the damnedest thing?"
"The damnedest."
Uncle Pete lifted Hound Dog off the card table, the dog licking his face until he set him down.
"Diamond Dog's one of yours," Tim said. "Not a nomad. This case is at your doorstep now. Thought I'd give you a knock-and-notice."
"Characteristically thoughtful."
"Just another service we provide to taxpaying citizens."
Uncle Pete puffed out his cheeks with a troubled sigh. "Shucks, that is bad news about Dog. A lot of my mother-club boys are discipline problems. Impervious to reform, no matter how we try. Now and then they run with the wrong crowd, choose a lifestyle that's socially irresponsible. You let me know if there's any way I or the Laughing Sinners can be of assistance. Deputy." His head was pulled back contemptuously, the stick of braided beard pointing at Tim like a gun barrel. "In the meantime I'd recommend you watch yourself. These are some deep, dark rabbit holes you're scurrying down. Keep up the pace, some of the boys might be inclined to start shooting back."
"We got you in our sights now."
"Yeah, Trouble?"
The doorknob twisted behind Tim, and he turned as Dana Lake entered. A Christmas Day house call spoke to the size of the retainer checks she was depositing. She tossed her sleek briefcase onto the recently vacated card table and shoved her seventies-porn-star tinted glasses up onto her perm. "Conversation over."
"Yeah," Tim said, "it is."
"I thought I made myself clear earlier, Deputy Rackley. This afternoon I'll file a complaint with the IA division of the Marshals Service and start a record with the federal prosecutor." Dana produced a sheaf of filled-out complaint forms. "If you bully my client one more time, you'll find yourself facing a civil action for the violation of my client's constitutional rights, a restraining order, and harassment charges."
Tim kept his eyes on Uncle Pete. "You feeling harassed?"
Pete held up his hand, thumb and forefinger calibrating about a half inch of air.
"My client's feelings aren't your concern. Nor is he one of the disenfranchised slobs you're used to intimidating, and I'm not some low-rent public defender who just limped through Boalt. You push us, we push back harder. This is a different league, Deputy. Watch that the rarefied air doesn't make you light-headed." The forms disappeared back into the fine-grain leather. "In the meantime I'll be handling the substantial casework from the series of raids you and your death squad carried out last night. You keep killing Sinners, you'll pay off my mortgage."
"I'm surprised it's not already paid off."
"I meant on the house in Vail." Dana snapped her briefcase closed. "Say good-bye, Mr. Rackley. You want to see my client again, you'd better bring a warrant and formal charges."
"That," Tim said, "seems like a fair arrangement."
"Don't let the bikers hit you on your way out."
Uncle Pete grinned. "You heard the woman. Believe me, you don't want to cross swords with this bitch." He moved to smack her on the ass, but she caught his hand at the wrist and threw it away, her eyes never leaving Tim's.
Another pinkie-free mistress led Tim back downstairs. Outside, the two Sinners standing guard over Dana's platinum Jag convertible threw Tim matching glares.
He offered a grin. "Feliz Navidad."
Chapter 32
Arush of deputies hit Tim at the command post's door.
"We got the time of death back on Meat Marquez," Thomas said. "Seventy-two hours, give or take. That puts us back to the early morning after Den and Kaner's breakout--"
"The bomb diagrams you found at Chief's?" Zimmer was animated, his voice higher than usual. "We matched the handwriting to Tom-Tom. Pulled a sample from his booking sheet in an old police report. The specs on the design for the saddlebag special that killed Frankie was in his hand, too."
"--can't link anything from Chief's to the mother chapter," Freed was saying.
"Or from the warehouse," Thomas chimed in. "Aside from Diamond Dog's dead ass, of course."
Tim waded forward into the room. Someone had hung Chief's originals on the wall, like a scalp. Four empty nails beside it awa
ited the other jackets.
Exemplary professionalism. You gonna let that stand, Task Force Leader?
Tim sighed and pulled Chief's jacket down, then used the hammer to pop the nails from the drywall--game over. There was no need for a speech; the others could take his implication. He turned, dusting his hands and picking up where he'd left off. "Blood match from the embalming table?"
Thomas again: "Still waiting on the lab. But they came back on the body. Surgical incisions in the stomach. Very clean, incised wounds, like from a box cutter or scalpel. Her throat laceration had some abraded edges and bridging of the connective tissue--it was cut with something bigger, a hunting knife maybe. Sounds like Den Laurey to me."
"Any organs removed?"
"Yes, but all accounted for. Stomach was sliced up pretty good."
Tim sought Freed in the cluster of men. "You locate Diamond Dog's bike last night?"
"Nope. I blanketed the area. Not a single chopper."
"Where are we with Chief's credit card?"
"Getting a warrant."
"Lean on that judge. Or find another. How's Guerrera?"
Maybeck: "Shook up and making it worse by pretending not to be."
Bear alone was sitting, a still presence in the swirls of movement. Tim dropped into the chair beside him. "Well?"
"CSI finished sorting the Dumpster trash. The bag I found was the only hit. It was stuffed with bloody rags." Bear inhaled and held his breath for a count, troubled. "They also found these loose among the other crap."
He tilted a manila envelope and a crime-scene Baggie slapped the table. It held three rolls of film. Black and white. ISO 1600. Each was numbered with a red pen.
"No latents, but CSI matched the red ink to a pen in the warehouse office. Given that the warehouse is deserted and the Dumpster gets emptied weekly, there's low odds that someone else besides Diamond Dog, Goat, and Co. tossed these in there." Bear held up his hand. "But before you get excited..."
Troubleshooter (2005) Page 15
